


Outside Chance

by plingo_kat



Category: The Dresden Files (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Case Fic, Gen, Mentioned Justin DuMorne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28133361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plingo_kat/pseuds/plingo_kat
Summary: “I told you this was a bad idea. Didn’t I say this was a bad idea?”
Relationships: Hrothbert of Bainbridge & Harry Dresden
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Outside Chance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).



> A snippet of a larger horror casefic. Unfortunately I got stuck and couldn't figure out how to finish it -- use your imagination, I suppose.

“I told you this was a bad idea. Didn’t I say this was a bad idea?”

Bob waved a ghostly hand, passing straight through a jutting piece of -- well, I guess it was a piece of what used to be a bookshelf, before it had splintered into a grotesque twist of wood and metal.

“Okay, okay. I admit it was a bad idea, all right?” Really, we both knew even before we stepped foot into the property, it was just that we didn’t have a choice. Uncle Justin -- that’s Justin DuMorne, upright Council Member to the public, and resident evil dark wizard to those slightly more discerning -- had done an excellent job pretending to be a model citizen. Which of course meant legally buying property and paying all his taxes, and organizing a periodic appraisement of his assets.

In the past two decades that wasn’t such a big deal. The first time I’d been barely an adult, still reeling from having accidentally murdered my closest living relative with magic. Lawyers and Bob had helped me deal with any sort of paperwork and the fees were all taken from Uncle Justin’s accounts. The second, I’d still had Bob to help me, and the Council had their own ways of keeping an old wizard’s lair safe for mundane mortals. I guessed that they used a strong glamour to keep the appraisers out of any dangerous areas, but honestly I wasn’t really sure. Subtle work like that wasn’t my forte. If it were up to me, I’d probably have tried to make the guy sick with a potion, or distract him with a fire or something. And if Uncle Justin’s house happened to go up in flames... Whoops, bad luck all around, too bad so sad.

 _This_ time I’d recently pissed the Council off something fierce, and they weren’t nearly so accommodating. I got a visit from Morgan in the middle of the afternoon where he delivered a letter made of real parchment sealed with a wax stamp along with his habitual glare. The seal was of a coiled dragon: Ancient Mai’s symbol.

“Maybe I can just... ignore this.” I suggested hopelessly.

“And when Mai comes and rains a fiery inferno down upon us?” Bob raised his eyebrows. “Will you be able to ignore _that_?”

“Hey, be realistic,” I joked. “Mai wouldn’t lower herself to come over in person, she’d send minions to do it.”

Bob was not amused.

So I’d opened the letter, and gotten the message that the Council expected Wizard Dresden to take responsibility for his own land holdings. It was actually worded like that, “land holdings,” written in fancy calligraphy which made me feel like I was in a tabletop RPG.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” I asked Bob. He read it over.

“The city of Chicago sent you a letter two weeks ago,” he said, apropos of nothing. Or so I thought. “Property appraisal. I believe you tossed it into your ‘deal with later’ pile.”

I thought of the giant mess of half-opened letters on the floor of my room and winced. “Any chance you remember what it said?”

Bob sighed and named an address. I dropped my head into my hands with a groan. We were going to have to visit my previous home.

Which led us to now, trapped inside of the Morningway manor with... something.

Wizarding residences always got a little strange over time. It happened when somebody with power lived in the same area for a while; the surroundings kind of soaked it up. Wizards also tended to collect weird artifacts and materials for their magic, like how I kept Bob’s skull, various potion ingredients, my hockey stick wand... Okay, so maybe my collection of magical paraphernalia was more eclectic than most, but at least I didn’t have thirty-three individually carved gorilla baculums displayed in cases in the foyer.

Yeah, that was a house I never visited again.

Anyway, going back to the Manor was actually fine at first. My case ran a little overtime, so when we pulled up the long winding driveway the sky was the dim purple of dusk. Bob manifested next to me as I stepped out of the car, hands clasped behind his back and mouth set in a prim little frown.

“I hope you brought a flashlight,” he said.

I conjured up a werelight in my hand, and Bob made a little _hmph_ noise. I jumped as he waved his hand through mine, pins and needles shooting all the way up to my elbow. 

“Bob!” 

“Oh, suck it up,” said Bob. “And put that out. Do you think walking around with a beacon like that is a good idea?”

“If we used a flashlight it’d probably die five feet past the doors,” I pointed out.

“Hm.” When more words weren’t forthcoming, I knew that Bob conceded the point. Hah.

The foyer was exactly as large and looming as I remembered, full of understated opulence and shadowed corners. The great weight of an enormous chandelier hung over our heads, tiers of dusty lights arrayed in neat hoops ascending toward the ceiling.

“Do you know where the light switch is?” Even though my voice was hushed, it seemed to echo through the space.

Bob pointed. I flicked it into the ‘on’ position and the chandelier burst on, only to die with crackling pops as the old filaments burnt out. One or two resilient bulbs flickered a couple of times before also giving up the ghost.

“Oops,” I said.

I turned the light switch off and decided to use my werelight from then on. Its warm light accompanied us as we walked through the hallways, shoes silent on the thick rugs full of dust. I noticed that there were no mouse droppings or chewed holes anywhere.

At last we came to Uncle Justin’s room. I almost never saw past the door when he was still alive; the sense of the forbidden still emanated from the wood. Reaching out to turn the doorknob was one of the last things I wanted to do.

Surprisingly, the door creaked open easily. I’d half-expected it to be locked, but instead a perfectly ordinary bedroom was revealed with another door leading off to the master bath off the left wall, the right fully taken up by a row of bookshelves. That was the entrance to Uncle Justin’s lab or I’d eat my staff.

“Ach!” Bob made a noise that I’d so long associated with disaster that I froze instinctively. Bob walked over and poked one finger -- or so I assumed, given his hand disappeared up to the wrist -- into the area I was about to touch behind a row of books. Lines of orange flared to life in front of the bookcase about two inches from my nose.

“...Oh.” I lowered my hand. “Thanks.”

“Be _careful_ , Harry,” said Bob. “This would have incinerated you if you set it off.”

Thinking about it, it was stupid of me to believe Uncle Justin left his workshop unprotected. Incineration would have been getting off lightly.

“I will,” I promised. “Show it to me again?”

Bob did so. We worked our way past various traps and wardings until Bob deemed it safe for me to enter, and I was finally able to trigger the hidden mechanism that flipped open the bookcase.

Uncle Justin’s workshop was... eerie. The oil lamps and candles along the walls all lit themselves when I stepped inside, and every surface was immaculate; it was as if Uncle had just stepped out for dinner instead of been dead for over twenty years. Even if the fetch had been in here, there should have been a light layer of dust. Instead it was all clean benches and unclouded glass ingredient jars.

But there was _power_ emanating from somewhere.

 _Do you feel that?_ I wanted to ask, but of course Bob couldn’t feel anything. The fine bone of his skull and the symbols carved on it locked his soul away from the outside world more securely than a welded iron casket. Instead I followed the faint trail to a silver circle set into the floor.

“Careful,” Bob repeated softly. “Justin did all his darkest work in the silver circle. Silver--”

“--for purity, brass for power, gold for control,” I cut him off with the mantra, learned in childhood and repeated innumerable times. I could recite it in my sleep and probably had. “Was it really so bad he needed a _silver_ circle?”

After all, any circle ought to contain magical energy just fine. Even one scratched in the dirt.

“More than,” said Bob, serious as I’d ever seen him. “Harry, you saw Justin for what he was, but you were not exposed to his darkest moments. You don’t know how far he’d fallen. I did. I do.”

“If it’s something powerful enough to linger twenty years after his death and through the barrier of a silver circle, we can’t just leave it,” I pointed out. “Who knows what could happen.”

“And who knows what could happen if you break the circle?” Bob shot back. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t die instantly upon reaching past the barrier. Or suffer some worse fate.”

“All right.” I wasn’t totally stupid. “Do you think he left any clue about what he was doing?”

Hah. What a question. Uncle Justin had easily half a dozen journals of research, I soon discovered, all of the most forbidden magic. Calling demons was the least of his crimes when compared to the repeated violation of free will, malicious sacrifice, connection with --

“The Outside?!” My voice pitched unflatteringly high when I got to certain pages in the grimoire. The book dropped from my nerveless fingers onto the table with a thunk.

“What?” Bob was in such a rush that he stepped through my leg to stand in the middle of the table, and I twitched as everything from my right knee down went numb. He muttered under his breath as he read, gesturing impatiently at me to flip the page when he needed it, until eventually he subsided and stared into the air with a frown.

I tried to figure out what had him so quiet. Despite what Bob might say, I wasn’t hopeless with magical theory; less meticulous than the ideal, maybe, more prone to following my instincts instead of the rigid exactitude that the more complicated rituals required, but I understood what I was doing. Kind of like stir fry versus baking. In one you eyeballed and threw things into a pan until it smelled or looked right, and in another you measured and timed everything until it was done. They both produced delicious food but the philosophy behind each was completely different.

From what I could decipher, the grimoire was describing a way to... contain? Open? Control? Do _something_ to a weak area of the barrier between realms, in any case. I could see how that might be useful for access to the Nevernever, or even life and death -- if you were crazy enough to think that was a good idea -- but there was _no_ good reason to mess with the Outside. One mistake and not only you, but the rest of the world, would become gibbering maniacs before quickly shuffling out of the mortal coil.

Or worse.

What I couldn’t see was a way to _mend_ the barrier, and that’s what we needed to do now. I had no idea what twenty years of built up Outside influence sweeping into the world looked like, and I didn’t want to learn. Given the little I could feel that was escaping a silver fucking circle, I wasn’t ready to risk doing anything rash.

“We must act quickly.” Bob’s voice dashed that resolution to pieces fast enough. “Otherwise it may be too late.”

“What do you mean?” I looked at the circle again. Still full of empty air. Still with a faint feeling of power, but nothing else. “Too late?”

“Tonight is the full moon, Harry.” Bob spoke low and tight with urgency. “A _harvest_ moon, off the three year cycle. Think! Twenty-one years, three and seven, near to the equinox -- see here, the runes -- whatever is within that circle, whatever ritual DuMorne began so long ago, it concludes _tonight_.”

Oh. Shit.


End file.
